What Does It Mean to Be “Utterly Content”? Semantic Prosody Impacts Nuanced Inferences Beyond Just Valence

Abstract

Words have semantic prosody when they collocate with positive/negative concepts in natural language. Semantic prosody encourages positive/negative evaluations. However, it is unknown whether semantic prosody affects inferences of other attributes aside from positivity/negativity. Semantic prosody likely causes people to expect the valence of what comes next, and expectation violations occur when authors have ironic intent and when authors lack fluency with a language. Four studies investigated whether semantically prosodic expectations impact specific inferences about authors. Participants perceived a writer as having greater ironic intent when the writer used a sentence with a semantically prosodic word that mismatched with the valence of adjacent words (Studies 1, 3, and 4). Additionally, in line with English as foreign language pedagogy, the same manipulation caused participants to perceive a writer as being less fluent in English (Studies 2, 3, and 4). Thus, semantic prosody generates expectations that affect nuanced inferences.